Next-Gen CASB Blog

EMM & BYOD - Oil and Water!

Earlier this week, we had one of our Global 2000 customers speak to our sales team on why they chose Bitglass for securing corporate data on mobile devices. The short answer is that EMM (aka MDM) and BYOD are like oil and water.

This customer first tried an EMM from MobileIron. Worked great on their corporate-owned iPads. But was not extensible to BYOD. Employees owned a vast range of devices, some old, some new, and most incompatible with MobileIron. And the few users that were able to install the MobileIron agent complained of poor battery life and invasion of privacy.

So the customer purchased SAP's Afaria EMM solution, supposedly one that was less hostile to Android devices. But that was no better. There are thousands of Android versions in use and the only way to detect and protect against "jailbroken" Androids was to install proprietary email clients on each of them. At which point the company contemplated handing out lower cost iPhone 5c devices to all employees. Low-end hardware, but worked well with the EMM software.

Employees were not happy to switch from their much nicer phones to the iPhone 5c. By now the company had spent over $3M on the secure mobility project and had gotten nowhere.

Enter Bitglass. Total Data Protection outside the firewall. On the network, in the cloud, at access and on devices. Any device, anywhere. No software. No invasion of privacy. One-click roll out.